Who-Iz.com

The new page rank update seems to be over, or almost over… how did your site(s) survive? There is a lot talk going around that page rank was lowered for most across the board, although many say there’s increased. Many sites seem to have made the initial jump from a page rank of zero to a level of 1, 2, or 3 fairly easily. From the talk (complaints mostly) on most of the popular discussion forums, it seems that the higher page rank sites (PR6 and above) tended to fall a point or two in terms of PR.

What is going to be the fallout of all this? Search engine traffic will differ for some and those that sell links may not be able to get nearly as much as they use to, while others are going to see the benefit of their new sites having PR in a rather short time.

Hope the PR update was kind to you.

Be Careful What Rights You Sign Away

How many people in today’s internet dominated world truly understand what they are doing every they check a box that says something to the effect of “yes, I have read and understand the user agreement”.

Most of the time when someone does this they are simply agreeing to harmless stipulations that protect the website/company from meaningless lawsuits, but sometimes people haven’t thought through what the stipulations they are agreeing to mean.

Take for example the case of Allison Chang a 16 year old from Dallas, Texas who had her picture taken by a friend at a church sponsored car wash. That friend uploaded the photo to Flickr, Yahoo.com’s popular photo sharing website, to share with friends and unfortunately the entire world. Flickr’s user agreement allows one to share photos with other users or Flickr itself with few strings attached.

Along comes Virgin Mobile, a popular cellphone company, who downloads the picture of Allison and totally without her knowing it uses it in an advertising campaign in Australia. What started out as Allison having her picture taken and a friend posting it online has turned into Allison’s face being plastered on billboards all over Australia with a slogan superimposed on it that she claims is embarrassing.

A lawsuit has been filed by Allison’s family against Virgin Mobile and Flickr.com and it remains to be seen what will come of it. On the surface it appears that the companies stuck to the letter of the agreement that the user confirmed when posting the photos. The two main points raised by this situation are:

Can person A enter an agreement to license the image of Person B without Person B being a party to the agreement.

And…

Be very careful and read the terms of service agreement before sharing anything personal online. It may seem inconvenient, but you should be sure you agree with the terms before clicking anything saying that yes, you in fact do agree with the terms.

Photo and file sharing whether a service like Flickr, MySpace, or Blogger is still a relatively new technology and phenomenon. It remains to be seen what the effect on individuals and society will be ten years from now when there is a vast public record of people’s images, thoughts, feelings, ideas, and statements. One thing is sure, there will be a lot of people regretting what they posted online.

Information about being scammed online.

The Frustration of Broken Links

Time for me to vent a little.

Is there anything more frustrating than exploring a website and coming across repetitive broken links? I know it will happen from time to time and I guess that’s alright but its those times where you’re really getting into the subject at hand, you’re seeking more information, and –blam—end of story.

I guess the really annoying thing is that it is not that hard to have links that work, especially if the links that are broken are internal links to other areas of your website. Broken external links are a different ballgame, the webmaster may not have 100% control of the link and hasn’t found that it is broke yet. That’s another reason to explore your own site sometime and see if anything looks wrong.

Well, thanks for letting me bend your ear a bit.